"He Gets The Crap Beaten Out Of Him!" Brad Bird Reveals The Mood Of 'Ray Gunn'
Welcome to the future.
Brad Bird really misses the way movies used to be made — or, more accurately, the way movie stars used to be. The venerated director was a welcome presence earlier this year at San Diego Comic-Con, where he reflected on his 30-year career and teased his latest film, the sci-fi noir Ray Gunn. Endearingly, though, he really gets animated when the conversation turns to the “imperfections” that added charm to Old Hollywood productions.
“There’s a history in animation, if a character is human and at all idealized, they always have to be so beautiful,” Bird tells Inverse. “And you go, ‘No’ — I mean, the most interesting faces that we have, you just think of the 30s and 40s. It’s like Ingrid Bergman: They said her eyebrows were too big and they needed to pluck them when they brought her over to the United States to be in movies. And David O. Selznick flung his body between her and all the people that were ready to fix her and said, ‘Don’t touch a hair on her head.’”
What might sound like a passionate tangent is actually key to the success of Ray Gunn. The upcoming Netflix film owes a lot to the films that featured Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, and the brightest stars of the 30s and 40s. There’s a reason why Bird’s titular hero (voiced by Sam Rockwell) looks a little like Humphrey Bogart, a man the director describes as “a weird guy with a lisp [who] shouldn’t be a romantic lead, and yet is a great romantic lead.” Ditto for Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson), the volatile pop star whose siren-like looks draw from Lauren Bacall, Veronica Lake, and one of Bird’s most beloved femme fatales, The Incredibles’ Mirage.
A noir set in a retrofuturist utopia, Ray Gunn is a hodgepodge of old and new influences. Casablanca was a narrative and aesthetic cornerstone. So were Chinatown and L.A. Confidential — not to mention the planet Coruscant from the Star Wars saga. It’s been a labor of love for Bird and Giacchino for years: the story was pinging around in Bird’s head long before he helmed his first feature, The Iron Giant. “Every time I thought about it and imagined what it could be, I’m eating popcorn in my mind,” he mused. “I’m like, ‘This would be cool. Why am I the only one in this theater? I got to make it so other people can see this.’”
With so much time to perfect the story, Ray Gunn might also be Bird’s most ambitious movie yet — and Inverse got the inside scoop on all things Ray Gunn ahead of its Comic-Con preview. Here’s everything we know so far.
Ray Gunn deconstructs the noir
Ray Gunn’s sprawling city feels unmistakably lived in: “There’s a life much larger than what the movie shows.”
Bird describes Ray Gunn as a glimpse into the future through the lens of Post-War pulp. “He’s in the future,” the director says of his lead, “but the future as seen from the period that we most associate with the detective film.” Ray Gunn “has elements of detective movies” — like the classic set-up that forces a private eye to spy on a wayward woman on her husband’s behalf — “and also 50s sci-fi movies at the same time.”
Netflix screened the film’s first half-hour for critics, which introduced Raymond Gunn, his alien sidekick Eyera (Tom Waits), and the sprawling city they call home. Inspired as much by the stepped architecture of the 1920s (think the Empire State Building, but at least a mile high) as by the streamlined, optimistic aesthetic of the 50s, this yet-unnamed utopia is concealing a dark underbelly of crime and brutality. Forward-thinking as this city might be, it’s also plenty intolerant of aliens like Eyera, who, with three spindly legs and one eye that also records photographs, is basically a walking, talking tripod.
Ray Gunn is filled with such clever designs: its first scenes feature Kathryn Hunter as a hulking crime boss with multiple arms hidden away within a smart waistcoat, a hapless henchman with grasshopper legs and a blistering jetpack, and blasters that make teleportation possible, if painful. The city feels lived-in and intoxicatingly dangerous, particularly in its dark corners. “That’s another fun thing about making movies: you’re constantly trying to imply that there’s a life much larger than what the movie shows,” Bird says.
Enter: Venus Nova
In unspooling the tropes of the noir, Ray Gunn builds an unorthodox romance.
With Ray Gunn, Bird wanted to play with the relationship between light and dark — particularly the shadows that can slink out of the places one least expects. That’s best felt with Venus, who’s introduced as the wayward dame you’d find at the heart of any noir. Without revealing too much about the plot, Ray and Venus will be forced to team up in Ray Gunn, echoing films like The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon. She might be the picture of Old Hollywood glamour and charm, but her role in the film goes back to Bird’s love of imperfections — and we can expect her chemistry with Ray to reflect that too.
Both of Bird’s leads, animated as they are, have a kind of lived-in charm. Venus conceals a hot temper that likens her to real-life, misunderstood pop icons. Bird’s been working on this story a long time, which means he’s been inspired by each generation’s biggest (and some of the most tragic) pop stars, Britney Spears and Amy Winehouse among them. Ray, meanwhile, is no saint, either. “He’s an imperfect character,” Bird says. “He makes mistakes all over the place. He gets the crap beaten out of him and has a black eye for a part of the movie. All that stuff makes them more relatable.”
Bird cites a scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, which features a bruised and battered Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford), as a kind of North Star for creating imperfect heroes. “I love the fact that Indiana Jones, by the end of Raiders, the shit is just beaten out of him. And everything hurts,” he says with a laugh. “It makes me like him. The fact that [Jack] Nicholson in Chinatown spends half the movie with a giant bandage on his nose is great.” We can expect that same kind of imperfection for both Ray and Venus in Ray Gunn, and that approach might make them two of Bird’s most evocative characters.
The sound of the future
Michael Giacchino’s Ray Gunn score seamlessly conveys the unease in Bird’s retrofuturist town.
“The people that I want to work with, whether they’re designing costumes or sets or animating characters or doing music, they’re co-storytellers,” Bird tells Inverse. Ray Gunn marks the director’s sixth consecutive project with composer Michael Giacchino, his most consistent collaborator. “It's like a successful marriage,” Bird says of their decades-spanning partnership, “because we don’t live together.”
Giacchino is once again in rare form for Ray Gunn. The score he’s crafted for the film is jazzy like The Incredibles, but pensive and moody like his work on The Batman. It goes a long way in shaping Bird’s vision for this future — and notably, it does all that without falling into the sonic tropes you’d find in any old detective movie.
“It has to come out of, ‘What is this world, and what is the feeling of all of this? If I were Ray in a particular situation, how would I feel?’” Giacchino says of building a score. “I have to do that exercise first every single time. Because if I start with just like, ‘Oh, it’s a detective movie. I’m going to write a detective score,’ that’s not going to work. It’s going to feel disconnected from the story.”
Ray Gunn is the latest in a series of noir updates, but it might be the most welcome so far.
Giacchino was keen on unearthing the psychological themes within Ray Gunn. “It’s more about unease than paranoia,” he explains. “It’s more about not knowing if the floor in front of you is going to be there when you step on it, and being ready to stumble into a different gait if you need to.”
What we’ve seen of Ray Gunn is just the tip of the iceberg, so it’s safe to assume that the story we’ll eventually get will take us through even more twists and turns. There’s still a way to go before it finally debuts on Netflix, but let’s hope the time flies.
